


Declining

by Northland



Category: The Lantern-Bearers - Sutcliff
Genre: 5 Things, Gen, Gift Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-05
Updated: 2009-12-05
Packaged: 2017-10-04 04:19:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northland/pseuds/Northland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five moments from post-Roman Britain; episodes from Aquila's life we never saw in the book. For Altariel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Declining

Disclaimer: Although I know how far it is from Venta to the mountains, I am decidedly not Rosemary Sutcliff or her estate.  


* * *

I. genitive

Aquila woke chilled, for his fever had broken -- though he did not know it then; this memory he pieced together much later. His mother's drooping head jerked up and her hand darted to his forehead. When she felt clammy sweat there she began to weep, silent tears sliding down her face like beads of rain. "Cold," he fretted. She dragged off her faded blue mantle and laid it over him. He curled snail-wise into the wool that bore her familiar scent of sage and lamp-oil and slept.

The next time he woke, she was gone; dead of the ague that he and Flavia had passed to her while she tended them.

 

II. ablative

There was so little wood in these barren lands that Bruni's pyre would be a scant one, but for a warrior no other rite was proper. For two days Aquila and Bruni's grandsons scoured the shore for driftwood, while Aude laid out the old man's body and chose what meagre treasure he would take with him.

She did not find the scroll of the Odyssey. As soon as Bruni was dead, Aquila had taken it from the bronze kist it had been looted with and stuffed it down the neck of his tunic.

The stiff edges of the papyrus chafed his skin as he stood beside the pyre. When the flames were high, he fumbled the scroll out and threw it at Bruni's feet. He did not know why, only that it seemed fitting for it to burn with the old man, together with all his hopes to return to Britain. Let Thormod beat him for it if he would.

_Where shall a man find sweetness to surpass his own home and his parents?  
In far lands he shall not, though he find a house of gold._

 

III. vocative

The only time Aquila spoke of it, he was graceless and abrupt as always. "Why did you persuade Ambrosius's companions to take me in?"

Brychan did not look up from the leash he was mending. "Conry thought well of you," he said. "And that is a better way to know a man's heart, I have found, than what is on his tongue."

At the sound of his name the hound half-opened one eye, a dark well shining in the firelight. Aquila scratched the massive, rough-coated head by his knee. "Certain it is that if you were judged by your tongue you would suffer," he said.

Brychan smiled down at his hands. "That is why I go everywhere with these princely hounds -- that men may say, if these noble beasts stay with him, surely Brychan is not so bad as that."

 

IV. accusative

The fire had shrunk down to coals, rose-coloured on the blackened hearth and a darker red at the heart: dark as the drying blood smeared on the sticky rags, on Ness's faded green robe, on her calves. Her face was turned away and she did not look at Aquila as he stood helplessly in the way of the women cleaning her and crooning softly. One was wrapping a fist-sized bundle for burial.

When they left, the clean bothy was suddenly cold and empty. Aquila thought of how much worse it must be for Ness and forced himself to kneel beside her.

"It would have been a girl." Her dull voice was scarcely audible over the whisper of the fire. He reached out to touch a strand of her dark hair, crimped where the women had unbound her plaits in a last attempt to ease the birth.

"There will be others," he offered at last, and felt her shoulders begin to shake.

 

V. locative

Beside the terrace steps, the scorched skeleton of an old fruit tree still stood; a damson, by the seedlings its disregarded rotting fruit had thrown up.

Flavian sent his men to picket the horses in the farm court and entered through the riven door. The rotting leather hinges barely held; the bolt had been looted for its metal long ago. This place had obviously not been reclaimed by squatters. Still, other warriors might have used it as a camp, or there might be inhuman inhabitants. His hands were scarred from disturbing a nest of feral cats in another abandoned villa. But here, his echoing footsteps on the slate floor were the only sounds other than mice skittering in the walls.

The wall paintings in the dining room were flaking and peeling with scabrous mold. He stepped closer in the fading dusk and peered at a seascape: Arion rode on a dolphin leaping from the waves, twin to the one carved in the flawed emerald of the signet ring hanging from a thong around his neck.

"Sir?" Bryn reported the horses watered and a fire started. "Did you find anything?"

Flavian wanted to be outside, away from this crumbling relic of a world he'd never known. "Nothing, Bryn. Let us go out now. I want to catch the last of the light."


End file.
